NASA is preparing to launch its TESS telescope from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Dr Morris Jones says it is the best plant-hunting telescope so far because it can see distant planets in greater detail, including the atmosphere and its chemistry.
The telescope will identify some 20,000 exoplanets, those located beyond the Solar System, 500 of which are expected to be Earth-sized.
TESS will discover the exolpanets by picking up the light they periodically blocked from a host star.

AFTER a slight hiccup, NASA’s newest planet-hunting satellite blasted off this morning.

Named TESS, or the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, the mission will see the vehicle scan 85 per cent of the skies for planets beyond the solar system, known as exoplanets. The satellite will help inform our search for nearby habitable worlds and potential alien life.

Equipped with plenty of hi-tech gear including four hugely powerful cameras developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, throughout its journey TESS will scan 200,000 of the brightest and closest stars in our solar neighbourhood, collecting 27 gigabytes of data per day.

With the help of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, TESS launched at 8:51am this morning from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The spacecraft was scheduled to be sent into a highly elliptical orbit approximately 48 minutes after launch.

The initial attempt to launch the $433 million spacecraft on Tuesday morning (AEST) was scraped about two hours before the planned takeoff and rescheduled for this morning due to a technical issue with the rocket launching the satellite.

The washing machine-sized spacecraft is built to search the nearest and brightest stars for signs of periodic dimming. These so-called “transits” may mean that planets are in orbit around them.

TESS will be the most extensive survey of its kind from orbit and the new-found planets identified by the spacecraft will eventually become prime targets for future telescopes looking to tease out any signs of life.

NASA’s astrophysics director, Paul Hertz, said missions like Tess will help answer whether we’re alone — or just lucky enough to have “the best prime real estate in the galaxy”.